Kintsugi Heroes
Catherine Maguire-Donvito · 44 min
A drama therapist reveals how giving refugee teenagers a stage to tell their own stories — from childhood laughter to war-zone terror — is quietly rewiring traumatised brains and transforming school communities across Sydney.
Catherine Maguire-Donvito is a drama therapist who runs Treehouse Theatre, a program that helps refugee teenagers in Sydney process trauma by telling their own stories on stage. Over four months, students move from sharing happy childhood memories to narrating the events that forced them to leave home, with each story rehearsed multiple times before a live performance at the Casula Powerhouse. The repetition is deliberate: trauma memories get stuck in the emotional part of the brain until they are processed into language and performed aloud in a safe setting, which gradually rewires how young people experience those memories.
Catherine works with about 30 students a year, but since 2011 tens of thousands of high school students have watched these performances. Stories emerge with extraordinary specificity: a Syrian boy remembers rifle sighting lasers crossing his body only weeks before he performed; an Afghan girl describes wading through razor wire at Kabul airport after her brother is cut by an American soldier; a boy from Iran loses his mother in a crowd and finds her by her shoes. These are not dramatised or simplified. They are told by the young people who lived through them, with all the sensory detail intact.
What happens next matters as much as the performance itself. A Kurdish Iraqi girl whose father was thrown from a third-storey building said her nightmares stopped after she did Treehouse. A Syrian boy named Haroon who was bullied at school became a minor celebrity among his peers after telling his story. Students who enter with minimal English develop formal and colloquial fluency through script work and rehearsal. Most importantly, Catherine says, they learn this: trauma is not a mental illness. It is a normal response to extraordinary events. With time and the right support, you will recover.
Every story here belongs to the person who lived it. They said yes to sharing it, and we sat with it carefully before it went up. Nothing here is exaggerated and nothing is used without permission. Read how we handle these stories ↗
Kintsugi Heroes · Registered Australian not-for-profit · kintsugiheroes.com.au ↗